Category Archives: QA Corner

In most tech companies, it has become commonplace to have VPN access to allow for working remotely. This can allow for greater productivity and flexibility for employees should they need to work from home or during business trips. It can also lead to some drawbacks. If you are not careful you could see a lot of your time-off spent doing work to the point that it feels like you never left the office. This can be especially difficult for workaholics and people with mindsets that can’t leave things unfinished.

Test automation can be a costly time consuming endeavor. Often automation code and test data become entangled, leading to both fragile tests and fragile automation code. Once that happens, new tests will require programming to implement them. This helps us understand why testers now need coding skills. Design changes to the application, such as changing where or how a value is input, will also require updating the automation code and in turn may disrupt the test data.

Protractor and Selenium are widely used tools for building functional end-to-end (e2e) automated tests. These tests execute a web-based application under test through a browser interface. The automated tests need to examine web page elements to determine whether their contents match expected results. They also need to operate on a webpage’s elements to drive the application. The tests need to click buttons, select from menus, and enter text in fields as part of the automated tests. A key problem and design decision is how the automated tests will locate elements in the DOM.

Over the years the software industry has developed many solutions to producing quality software to meet business needs. Software, however, is an ever-changing industry, and our tried methods are failing to keep up with modern development practices. Quality Engineering has made waves in the industry for a few years and is often associated with iterative or agile development processes, as a new way of ensuring quality software. How does Quality Engineering fit in to traditional Quality Assurance to get us working software?

In Java performance testing, one of the most common and sometimes most frustrating issues is the memory leak. Even the most experienced engineer can slip a memory leak into their code. It is important to know how to spot one and debug the issue. Even if you can’t find the source of the issue without a developer’s help, they will always need data to work with so being able to provide useful information is crucial. Therefore, for a Java memory leak, the first thing you will always be asked for is a heap dump.

Protractor is a useful tool for end-to-end tests for AngularJS applications using nodejs and Jasmine. Any suite of end-to-end tests will have to be maintained and enhanced as the application being tested changes. The tests can require as much maintenance as the application itself. Best practices in structuring the test code can simplify test maintenance and reduce maintenance costs. A key idea for structuring end-to-end tests is the page object.